Most operational databases can be used for many BI applications.

Business Intelligence (BI) systems fall into two broad categories: reporting and data warehousing.

A data warehouse is a database system that is optimized for operational transaction processing.

Data Mining uses simple arithmetic techniques such as sums, averages, and groupings to perform what-if analyses, to make predictions, and to facilitate decision making.

Business Intelligence (BI) systems do not obtain data from operational databases.